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Gotham and the Death of the West

“It’s just a movie”, we so often hear in response to any criticism of a film’s suggestive power over the mass psyche. Thus propaganda emanating from Hollywood is made to appear a harmless diversion rather than the agent of social control and transformation it actually is. When a black-clad killer stormed the theater premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado on July 20th and proceeded to rake the audience with gunfire, the exact same scenario was transpiring on-screen before them in a preview of the upcoming picture Gangster Squad. For victims of the massacre and the American public at large, reality and fantasy have been fused in an alchemical wedding; it is in this realm that phantasms and flickering simulacra deceive men and lure them to destruction. Here, too, death is master. [1]

As the final installment of the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises is more than a movie, just as its hero Bruce Wayne sought to overcome limits imposed upon mere mortals. Director Christopher Nolan has crafted a film of grand and sinister sweep, though his cinematography provides only the backdrop to an explicit and inescapable theme: the ruin of the West, its reduction to ashes. Even standard liberal convention, special effects and pulverizing violence in the screenplay cannot conceal the apocalyptic vision that unfolds before us.

While Nolan’s story might be seen as a template for varied interpretations, certain symbols attain clear meaning within its plot. Gotham is not any imaginary city or simply a representation of New York, but the archetypal Western polis in its terminal stage of development. Modern man, with his technological wonders, his “rights”, his endless desires and entertainments, has liberated himself from all transcendent authority and stands in obedience to his passions alone. And one dream in particular never seems to leave him- the total organization of earthly happiness, an ideal justifying even the slaughter of innocents. Global civilization celebrates progress with ever-increasing fervor, seemingly oblivious to its descent into a subhuman state of anarchic savagery. As Gotham collapses, so, too does the American pluralist experiment- flimsy Enlightenment abstractions of liberty, equality and popular sovereignty are crushed by the exertion of a superior will.

The decadent polis is easy prey to oligarchs, bandits and utopian radicals. Gotham, built on lies and ruled by corrupt sociopaths, will soon be in the hands of violent psychopaths. Emerging from the underground, the ruthless mercenary Bane dons the mantle of Spartacus and carries out a revolutionary coup. In the name of “the people”, the deracinated mob, the arch-villain and his men unleash a reign of terror, replete with another storming of the Bastille and Jacobin-style tribunals presided over by the deranged Scarecrow, a latter-day De Sade. Yet amidst the chaos of proletarian dictatorship, we spot a noteworthy point of intrigue: Bane’s operation was bankrolled by none other than a capitalist. Looking to acquire the resources of the Wayne business empire, plutocratic rival Roland Daggett set the uprising in motion. Such details have their origin not in comic books, but historical context: the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, along with the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, was facilitated by international finance.

Bane’s true mission is neither enrichment nor insurrection; he has been tasked with eliminating Gotham entirely. Behind the machinations of capital and spasms of “people power” stands the League of Shadows, the secret society that has sentenced the city to death. Charged with this assignment, Bane acts not only as Gotham’s executioner, but as the good doctor who assists in its suicide. As Plato saw tyranny to be the logical culmination of democracy, so Bane proclaims revolution as “a new era in Western civilization”, knowing full well he is accelerating its self-destruction. An image of the nihilist, postmodern West, Gotham is a land seemingly beyond redemption, and it is no more than Bruce Wayne’s noblesse oblige to its inhabitants that brings him to their defense. Beyond this intimation of moral scruple, the duel between Batman and Bane is purely a brutal combat between opposing wills, the protector and the predator. The new era has dawned, and its supermen are wrathful beasts.

Even if Gotham City were delivered from criminal gangs and external threats, it would still implode from despair. Contemporary society is relentless in pursuit of material gain and sensory pleasure, for it seeks to obliterate any trace of the eternal, raising a tower in defiance of the heaven it denies. Warriors, poets, artists and ascetics who knew Truth in the heavenly kingdom and struggled for it were but fools and psychotherapy cases- they were hung up about a lack of sex or didn’t have television to occupy their time, you see. Today’s hedonist consumers frantically proclaim themselves so much happier in self-worship. Yet everywhere the modern spirit dominates, we witness the wreckage of our vain endeavors in the race toward annihilation; suicide and madness are rational responses to a pointless existence. The early 20th-century expert on conspiracies and subversion Nesta Webster warned of a future imperial system single-mindedly committed to the death of the soul:

Now that civilization is world-wide the dream of a return to nature and the joys of savagery conjured up by Rousseau and Weishaupt can never be realized. Yet if civilization in a material sense cannot be destroyed, it is nonetheless possible to take the soul out of it, to reduce it to a dead and heartless machine without human feelings or divine aspirations. The Bolsheviks continue to exist amidst telephones, electric light, and other amenities of modern life, but they have almost killed the soul of Russia. In this sense then civilization may pass away, not as the civilizations of the ancient world passed away, leaving only desert sands and crumbling ruins behind them, but vanishing imperceptibly from beneath the outward structure of our existing institutions. Here is the final goal of the world revolution.

Christopher Nolan made The Dark Knight Rises both ominous and captivating, but there is no catharsis to complete the work. Its continuous foreboding reflects our own subconscious anticipation of the next great war, the next market crash, the next cataclysm and the end of all things. And what is Gotham but the depraved and dying polis, corrupted spiritually through transgression? The city nonetheless still awaits its redeemer. Having rejected salvation in Christ, Western man has murdered God in his heart, replacing the divine image with that of the beast[2]. He seeks an earthly kingdom and joyfully will welcome superman, the new god who is Antichrist. No political movements or military actions in themselves could stave off this day, but only a counter-revolution of love and repentance.

[1]Gangster Squad was promptly pulled by studio chiefs and a more appropriate trailer rolled out. Django Unchained, a sure Quentin Tarantino masterpiece set for Christmas, features Jamie Foxx as an escaped African slave-turned-bounty hunter in the antebellum South. When asked how he feels about his new profession, Django replies, “Kill white folks and they pay you for it? What’s not to like?” Needless to say, this elicited a laugh-track response from many in the audience. And why should anyone be concerned over such incitement to murder? After all, it’s just a movie.

[2] 19th-century Russian thinker Ivan Aksakov gave a brilliant summation of the prideful self-will so characteristic of our age:

Progress that denies God and Christ ultimately becomes regression; civilization ends in savagery; liberty in despotism and slavery. Casting from himself God’s image, man will inevitably strip away, as he already is doing, his human image to manifest that of the beast.

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Ronald H. Bayor’sRace & The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta is one of Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) scholarly books that blames the current state of the Black Mecca on the lingering vestiges of white racism.

Just as in Detroit, it was white flight from Black criminality to virtually crime free white suburbs surrounding the city that allowed Black people to become the majority of Atlanta by 1970 and elect Maynard Jackson in 1973. This event was the culmination of years of cohesive actions by the Black community in Atlanta:

“The black response to a city being shaped by segregation was to form their own self-help organizations, develop businesses and colleges to serve the African-American community, negotiate for land and housing, fight for political inclusion, and, most important, to continually point out to white Atlantans what should have been obvious: measures that diminished black life in the city also had negative effects on whites. Black Atlanta’s community development, resistance to or bypassing of white policies, and implementation of their own policies after 1973 were some of the shaping aspects of race that one could see in Atlanta.”(p. 257, Race & The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta)

The election of Maynard Jackson, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, as the first black mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1973 was a major landmark in the southern US city’s history.

It signposted a change of guard in the local political class from white to black; no white person has since been elected mayor.

Jackson, who served three terms in office, was a prominent exponent of affirmative action.

In his first two terms, he rattled Atlanta’s old cosy business relationships, alienating some, but wooing them back in his third term with deft deal-making skills. In 1978, he signed a law requiring 25% of the city’s projects to be set aside for minority firms. The policy, which still operates today, made Atlanta the most hospitable place in America for black entrepreneurs.

He also pushed through an affirmative action program that made it mandatory for contractors to take on minority-owned businesses as partners, and forced the city’s major law firms to hire African-American lawyers. He threatened that “tumbleweeds would run across the runways of Atlanta airport” if blacks were not included in city contracts.

This is the reason Atlanta is known as “The Black Mecca”; an aggressive affirmative action program implemented to enrich Black citizens of Atlanta, that resulted in enticing Black people from around the country to return to the city (and surrounding metro Atlanta area) to get a piece of the pie. An article from Ebony in 2002 notes:

Though Census figures show that Atlanta’s Black population has dipped slightly (it peaked at 282,911 in 1980 and stands at 255,689 today), more than 150,000 African-Americans still moved into the city during the 1990s. The real boom was in the surrounding bedroom communities in DeKalb, Fulton and Cobb counties. More than half a million Blacks swelled the population of those communities in the 1990s. In fact, more Blacks moved to metropolitan Atlanta than to any other metro area in the country during the last decade.

Even in once-segregated strongholds like DeKalb County, which cuts a small swath through the city of Atlanta, Blacks have changed the face of the social and political landscape. In November 2000, DeKalb residents elected 41-year-old Vernon Jones as the county’s first Black chief executive. “The times are definitely changing in and around this metropolitan area,” Jones maintains. “The whole area is just much more diverse, and that’s changing things. There are some glass ceilings, too. We still don’t have a Black senator or a Black governor. But the population is growing. More and more Black people are moving here, affluent Black people. That is making a difference.”

Today, Atlanta boasts more Black-owned companies per capita than any other city in the nation except Washington, D.C., according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. It is home to the nation’s second-largest Black insurance company, Atlanta Life. Citizens Trust Bank, the fourth-largest Black bank, also is based there.

“There are business role models here like Jesse Hill and Herman Russell who allow young people to see what the possibilities are,” says Thomas Dortch, national chairman of 100 Black Men of America.

But the new economic landscape produced by the labor, lobbying and civil rights leadership of Atlantans such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young and Congressman John Lewis also has created scintillating opportunities in areas where Blacks previously were shut out. As Atlanta has grown, so too have the fortunes of scores of Black businessmen who have participated in its amazing development. With the backing of Maynard Jackson, who is credited with initiating the building boom that put Atlanta on the map (some call Hartsfield airport “the airport that Maynard built”), business owners like construction magnate Herman J. Russell, whose H.J. Russell & Co. is the 14th-largest Black business in the country, literally paved the way for the unprecedented success of the Black businesses that followed.

Using aggressive affirmative action initiatives, Jackson ushered in an era in which the percentage of the contracts Black businesses received from the city grew from less than one-tenth of 1 percent in 1970 to more than $250 million today. It is said that 90 percent of the contracts that go to minority-owned firms that do business with American airports are at Hartsfield. Herman Russell, along with his partner, pioneering restaurateur James Paschal, operate several of those concessions, but many young Black business owners also have broken into this lucrative territory.

More and more Black people – who are vacating cities they helped ruin during the Great Migration of 20th century – are moving back to Atlanta. Fittingly, there is a correlation to property value drops, lower tax revenue collected – resulting in teacher and public employees layoffs and a lack of funds for improvements in infrastructure (and increased crime) – and further white flight from these counties Black people are settling in.

Attracted by affirmative action policies that helped enrich one segment of the population, one wonders if metro Atlanta’s white population would ever dare unite to defend their interests? The looming showdown over North Fulton vs. South Fulton would lead one to say “yes, they will.”

But its not just affirmative action policies that have helped enrich Black people in the private sector.

In describing Freaknic – a raucous Black spring break event that was eventually evicted from Atlanta – in the opening chapter of A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe writes:

Atlanta was their city, the Black Beacon, as the Mayor called it, 70 percent black. The Mayor was black… and twelve of the nineteen city council members were black, and the chief of police was black, and the fire chief was black, and practically the whole civil service was black, and the Power was black. (p.17)

But going back to that quote from Boyer, one glaring inconsistency with logic sticks out:

to continually point out to white Atlantans what should have been obvious: measures that diminished black life in the city also had negative effects on whites.

Actually, it’s measures that improved Black life in the city that have had negative effects on whites. More importantly, it’s had negative effects on Black people. Despite these affirmative action programs, poverty (and crime, which has no relation to poverty) in the Black community in metro Atlanta is at levels that rival any in all of America:

Atlanta’s status as a haven for African-Americans was greatly reinforced by the election of the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1973. This accomplishment was due not to the progressive sentiments of the majority of Atlanta’s white population, but rather their departure from the city in big numbers. In the book Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams, Charles Rutheiser reports:

He (Jackson) assumed a confrontationalist posture vis-a-vis the white business community, arguing passionately for a greater distribution of the benefit of growth among African-Americans. Ina showdown over the new airport, Jackson succeeded in establishing a minority business enterprise program that became widely regarded as a model for minority set-asides for municipal contracts. Together, with extensive affirmative action hiring by Atlanta-based corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, and an already-established black business community, the set-aside program made Atlanta a nationally known center for African-American economic opportunity in the latter part of the 1970s and 1980s.

Despite economic opportunities for the middle class and a continuous black presence at city hall for two decades, Atlanta was far from being a decent place, much less a paradise, for the majority of its African American residents. By any and every statistical measure, from poverty and unemployment to graduation rates and crime, the quality of life “enjoyed” by the city’s African-American majority plummeted during this period. The percentage of black households living in poverty nearly doubled between 1980 and 1990, to more than a third of all households. Over half of the city’s children lived in poverty.

Nowhere was the divide between the two black Atlantas more manifest than in the area of crime. Atlanta was nationally renowned for its high crime rate in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its homicide rate more than doubled between 1965 and 1970, making the city the country’s “murder capital.” Atlanta has retained the dubious honor of being one of the nation’s most violent cities to the present day. The vast majority of these crimes occurred, then as now, in the cities poorest census tracts to the south, east, and west of downtown, areas that are more than 95 percent African American.

A simple question has to be asked at this point: who were those white people in power in Atlanta that caused Black people to unite and create cohesive organizations that would – in turn – consolidate political power in their own hands (both in the public and private sector)? Who were these white people that allowed Atlanta to become the Black Mecca?:

An incredibly close-knit group of friends, neighbors, and business partners from the city’s posh Northside, the power structure shared a common history. “Almost all of us had been born and raised within a mile or two each other,” remembered Ivan Allen Jr., a member of the group who would succeed (William) Hartsfield as Atlanta’s mayor from 1962 to 1970. “We had gone to the same schools, to the same churches, tot he same golf courses, to the same summer camps. We had dated the same girls. We had played and worked within our group.” Member of the power structure not only shared a common past and present; they shared a common vision of the future. In Allen’s telling, they were “dedicated to the betterment of Atlanta as much as a Boy Scout troop is dedicated to fresh milk and clean air.”(p. 28, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, by Kevin M. Kruse)

The actions by the white elite (what can only be described as the white “Managerial Elite” of Black-Run America) from 1940 – 1970 resulted in the vacating of the city by middle class whites (who couldn’t insulate their families from Black crime and integrated schools as the Northside elite could with private schools) and, in turn, resulted in the nightmarish of 2012 metro Atlanta: an entire metro area witnessing property depreciation, increased crime, and staggering costs for commutes.

Interesting that despite government mandated policies of affirmative action, minority contracts, and hiring practices that have turned all public jobs (tax supported) in the metro Atlanta area into a Black vocational program, Black communities there are in complete disarray.

Those areas that stayed white (despite a hostile government, private sector hiring practices that favor non-whites, and an onus on entrepreneurship): thriving. Atlanta has been rebuilt up Georgia 400 to Roswell, Sandy Springs, Alpharetta and Forsyth County.

The tallest buildings in all of suburban America, the 30+ story King and Queen Towers – The Concourse at Landmark Center in Sandy Springs – recently went on the market and analysts predict the sale will rival what the tallest building in the southeast (which was foreclosed), the Bank of America Plaza, went for. The former complex is located Outside the Perimeter, in a city that is majority white; the latter located in downtown Atlanta.

Sandy Springs is one of these primarily white cities in North Fulton that could secede from the county tomorrow and instantly see property values rise dramatically.

More on this later this week.

Since 1973, untold financial investing in the Black Mecca (through primarily white tax-dollars and the appropriation of collected revenue toward minority contracts and the establishment of an entrenched Black monopoly on public jobs) has resulted in the creation of a Black elite in Atlanta, which should now represent a sunk cost. No matter how many private companies enact affirmative action policies in hiring, this too will represent a sunk cost over time.

Atlanta – The City too Busy to Hate – represents a microcosm of how one can look at the entire nation after Black-Run America (BRA) rose to power: The white managerial elite rushing to cede power to Blacks, who have and always will maintain a close racial cohesion. It has been the zeitgeist in America for some time to be seen as “progressive” when it comes to Black America.

The state of 2012 Atlanta and the metro Atlanta area is directly correlated to two things: 1. Blacks moving from around the nation to city to take advantage of affirmative action policies enacted in 1973 that have created the facade of a “Black Mecca” — only because of the misappropriation of tax-dollars by a racially cohesive drive to augment Blacks, and, 2. White people trying to avoid living anywhere near Black people. No matter the distance of the commute, having limited interaction with Black people is preferred.

One will never be able to quantify (nor qualify) what might have been for Atlanta – and metro Atlanta – were a race-based policy not enacted in 1973 and instead, a merit-based policy enshrined into law.

The white managerial elite of Atlanta sold the city to Organized Blackness; as a result, every one has suffered.

Such is the case for all of America.

To look back at what Mr. Boyer stated in his book, it should become clear: the day that white people decide to do any of things he listed as the Black response to “segregation” in Atlanta, is the day BRA ends.

Hilariously, it looks like it will be in the very Northside of Atlanta (North Fulton) that sees secession attempted and a new county created… Look to a forthcoming essay on Vdare to see what this means.

Not So Fast On That Whole Economic Recovery Thing

Not so fast. Those that are publicly declaring that an economic recovery has arrived are ignoring a whole host of numbers that indicate that the U.S. economy is in absolutely horrendous shape. The truth is that the health of an economy should not be measured by how well the stock market is doing. Rather, the truth health of an economy should be evaluated by looking at numbers for things like jobs, housing, poverty and debt. Some of the latest economic statistics indicate that unemployment is getting a little bit worse, that the housing market continues to deteriorate, that poverty in America continues to soar and that our debt problem is worse than ever. If we were truly experiencing the kind of economic recovery that the United States has experienced after every other post-World War II recession we would see a sharp improvement across the board in most of our economic statistics. But that simply is not happening. Sadly, this is about as much of an “economic recovery” as we are going to get because soon the economy will be getting much worse. So enjoy this period of relative stability while you can.

The Obama administration would have us believe that unemployment in the United States has declined, but the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed has stayed very, very flat for more than two years and now there are some measures of unemployment that are actually getting worse.

For example, according to Gallup the unemployment rate in the United States has risen from 8.5% in December to 8.6% in January to 9.1% in February. The Obama administration would have us believe that it is actually going the other direction.

Initial unemployment claims are rising again. For the week ending March 3rd, they increased by 8,000 over the previous week to 362,000. This is not the kind of good news that people were hoping for.

What the U.S. economy could really use are millions of good jobs. But those are being shipped out of the country at a staggering pace.

Right now there are millions of Americans in their prime working years that are sitting at home wondering what to do with their lives. The average duration of unemployment in the United States continues to hover near a record high, and if we were truly experiencing an economic recovery it should have been falling by now.

But a lot of Americans have bought into the propaganda about an economic recovery and they are out running up huge amounts of debt once again. In January, consumer credit increased by much more than expected. The following is from a recent Reuters report….

Nonrevolving credit, which includes auto loans as well as student loans made by the government, rose $20.723 billion during the month. That was the biggest increase in dollar terms since November 2001, when credit was surging in the wake of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Don’t fall into the trap of debt slavery. During the last recession millions of Americans lost their homes and most of what they owned because they got overextended.

Don’t do it.

The U.S. housing market continues to deeply struggle as well. If we were really in an economic recovery housing would be bouncing back. But that is not happening. Just consider the following facts….

*The number of new homes sold in the United States continues to hover near a record low.

*U.S. home prices in the 4th quarter of 2011 were four percent lower than they were during the 4th quarter of 2010.

*According to CoreLogic, 22.8 percent of all homes with a mortgage in the United States were in negative equity as of the end of the 4th quarter of 2011. That was an increase from 22.1 percent in the third quarter.

For example, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased to 46.5 million – a brand new all-time record.

If we really were in an economic recovery, wouldn’t that number be going down?

We should be thankful that the U.S. economy is not declining as rapidly as it was during 2008 and 2009. But what we are experiencing right now is not an economic recovery. It is simply just a bubble of false hope.

The big problem is that our nation is covered in an ocean of constantly expanding debt.

U.S. consumers are drowning in debt, U.S. businesses have pushed debt levels to the red line, and the U.S. financial system is massively overleveraged.

Of course government debt is our biggest debt problem of all.

All over the nation, state and local governments are on the verge of financial ruin.

If we were in the middle of an economic recovery, so many states would not be in crisis mode. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times declared that “California could run out of cash in March“. As the economy continues to crumble we are going to hear a lot more of this kind of thing.

A lot of local governments around the nation are on the verge of total financial collapse. Stockton, California has announced that they will be defaulting on some debt payments, and Suffolk County in New York recently declared a fiscal emergency after discovering that it would rack up more than 500 million dollars of debt between 2011 and 2013.

Keep your eyes open for more news items like this in the months ahead.

Of course the biggest problem of all is the U.S. national debt and it continues to rapidly get worse.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. government had a budget deficit of 229 billion dollars in the month of February. That is the worst one month budget deficit in the history of the United States.

The Congressional Budget Office also says that the U.S. government is now borrowing 42 cents of every single dollar that it spends.

Ouch.

The U.S. national debt has gotten more than 59 times larger since 1950.

But Barack Obama and most members of the U.S. Congress don’t really care about what they are doing to our future.

What they care about is winning the next election so that they can continue living their fabulous lives.

Barack Obama is supposed to be taking care of the American people, but instead he has been very busy taking care of the people who helped him get elected. Politics in America is all about money. Just check out the following very short excerpt from a recent article in the Washington Post….

More than half of Obama’s 47 biggest fundraisers, those who collected at least $500,000 for his campaign, have been given administration jobs. Nine more have been appointed to presidential boards and committees.

At least 24 Obama bundlers were given posts as foreign ambassadors, including in Finland, Australia, Portugal and Luxembourg. Among them is Don Beyer, a former Virginia lieutenant governor who serves as ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Washington D.C. is deeply corrupt and if you are waiting for our politicians to fix our problems you are going to be deeply disappointed.

The federal government is not going to save you.

Our politicians are not going to save you.

You better figure out how you are going to take care of yourself and your family in the years ahead because this is about as good as things are going to get.

This “economic recovery” is about to end and more pain is about to begin.

Greece Has Defaulted – Which Country In Europe Is Next?

Well, it is official. The restructuring deal between Greece and private investors has been pushed through and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association has ruled that this is a credit event which will trigger credit-default swap contracts. The ISDA is saying that there are approximately $3.2 billion in credit-default swap contracts on Greek debt outstanding, and most analysts expect that the global financial system will be able to absorb these losses. But still, 3.2 billion dollars is nothing to scoff at, and some of these financial institutions that wrote a lot of these contracts on Greek debt are going to be hurting. This deal with private investors may have “rescued” Greece for the moment, but the consequences of this deal are going to be felt for years to come. For example, now that Greece has gotten a sweet “haircut” from private investors, politicians in Portugal, Italy, Spain and other European nations are going to wonder why they shouldn’t get some “debt forgiveness” too. Also, private investors are almost certainly going to be less likely to want to loan money to European nations from now on. If they will be required to take a massive haircuts at some point, then why in the world would they want to lend huge amounts of money to European governments at super low interest rates? It simply does not make sense. Now that Greece has defaulted, the whole game is going to change. This is just the beginning.

The “restructuring deal” was approved by approximately 84 percent of all Greek bondholders, but the key to triggering the payouts on the credit-default swaps was the fact that Greece decided to activate the “collective action clauses” which had been retroactively inserted into these bonds. These collective action clauses force most of the rest of the bondholders to go along with this restructuring deal.

The Greek parliament’s retroactive law last month to insert collective action clauses (CACs) into its bonds to coerce creditor hold-outs has added a fresh twist. These CAC’s are likely to be activated over coming days. Use of retroactive laws to change contracts is anathema in credit markets.

If a government can go in and retroactively change the terms of a bond just before it is ready to default, then why should private investors invest in them?

That is a very good question.

But for now the buck has been passed on to those that issued the credit-default swaps. As mentioned above, the ISDA says that there are approximately $3.2 billion in Greek credit-default swaps that will need to be paid out.

However, that number assumes that a lot of hedges and offsetting swaps cancel each other out. When you just look at the raw total of swaps outstanding, the number is much, much higher. The following is from a recent article in The Huffington Post….

If you remove all hedges and offsetting swaps, there’s about $70 billion in default-insurance exposure to Greece out there, which is a little bit bigger pill for the banking system to swallow. Is it possible that some banks won’t be able to pay on their default policies? We’ll find out.

Yes, indeed. We will find out very soon.

If some counterparties are unable to pay we could soon see some big problems cascade through the financial system.

But even with this new restructuring deal with private investors, Greece is still in really bad shape.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told reporters recently that it “would be a big mistake to think we are out of the woods”.

Even with this new deal, Greek debt is still projected to be only reduced to 120 percent of GDP by the year 2020. And that number relies on projections that are almost unbelievably optimistic.

In addition, there are still a whole host of very strict conditions that the Greek government must meet in order to continue getting bailout money.

Also, the upcoming Greek elections in just a few weeks could bring this entire process to an end in just a single day.

The Greek economy has been in recession for five years in a row and it continues to shrink at a frightening pace. Greek GDP was 7.5 percent smaller during the 4th quarter of 2011 than it was during the 4th quarter of 2010.

Unemployment in Greece also continues to get worse.

The average unemployment rate in Greece in 2010 was 12.5 percent. During 2011, the average unemployment rate was 17.3 percent, and in December the unemployment rate in Greece was 21.0 percent.

Young people are getting hit the hardest. The youth unemployment rate in Greece is up to an all-time record of 51.1 percent.

Unfortunately, there is no light at the end of the tunnel for Greece at this point. The latest round of austerity measures that are now being implemented will slow the economy down even more.

Sadly, several other countries in Europe are going down the exact same road that Greece has gone.

Investors all over the globe are wondering which one will be the “next Greece”.

Some believe that it will be Portugal. The following is from a recent article in The Telegraph….

“The rule of law has been treated with contempt,” said Marc Ostwald from Monument Securities. “This will lead to litigation for the next ten years. It has become a massive impediment for long-term investors, and people will now be very wary about Portugal.”

Right now, the combination of all public and private debt in Portugal comes to a grand total of 360 percent of GDP.

In Greece, the combined total of all public and private debt is about 100 percentage points less than that.

So yes, Portugal is heading for a world of hurt. The following is more about Portugal from the recent Telegraph article mentioned above….

Citigroup expects the economy to contract by 5.7pc this year, warning that bondholders may face a 50pc haircut by the end of the year. Portugal’s €78bn loan package from the EU-IMF Troika is already large enough to crowd out private creditors, reducing them to ever more junior status.

So why should anyone invest in Portuguese debt at this point?

Or Italian debt?

Or Spanish debt?

Or any European debt at all?

The truth is that the European financial system is a house of cards that could come crashing down at any time.

German economist Hans-Werner Sinn is even convinced that the European Central Bank itself could collapse.

More than a year ago, German economist Hans-Werner Sinn discovered a gigantic risk on the balance sheets of Germany’s central bank. Were the euro zone to collapse, Bundesbank losses could be half a trillion euros — more than one-and-a-half times the size of the country’s annual budget.

So no, the European debt crisis is not over.

It is just getting warmed up.

Get ready for a wild ride.

15 Potentially Massive Threats To The U.S. Economy Over The Next 12 Months

We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable, and the potential for an event that could cause “sudden change” to the U.S. economy is greater than ever. There are dozens of potentially massive threats that could easily push the U.S. economy over the edge during the next 12 months. A war in the Middle East, a financial collapse in Europe, a major derivatives crisis or a horrific natural disaster could all change our economic situation very rapidly. Most of the time I write about the long-term economic trends that are slowly but surely ripping the U.S. economy to pieces, but the truth is that just a single really bad “black swan event” over the next 12 months could accelerate our economic problems dramatically. If oil was cut off from the Middle East or a really bad natural disaster suddenly destroyed a major U.S. city, the U.S. economy would be thrown into a state of chaos. Considering how bad the U.S. economy is currently performing, it would be easy to see how a major “shock to the system” could push us into the “next Great Depression” very easily. Let us hope that none of these things actually happen over the next 12 months, but let us also understand that we live in a world that has become extremely chaotic and extremely unstable.

In the list below, you will find some “sudden change” events that are somewhat likely and some that are quite unlikely. I have tried to include a broad range of potential “black swan events”, but there are certainly dozens more massive threats that could potentially be listed.

The following are 15 potentially massive threats to the U.S. economy over the next 12 months….

#1 War With Syria – U.S. Senator John McCain is now publicly calling for U.S. airstrikes against Syria. A military conflict with Syria becomes more likely with each passing day.

#2 War With Iran – A war in the Middle East involving Iran could literally erupt at any time. The following is from a Reuters news report that was issued on Monday….

President Barack Obama appealed to Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday to give sanctions time to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the Israeli prime minister offered no sign of backing away from possible military action, saying his country must be the “master of its fate.”

#3 A Disorderly Greek Debt Default – Many reporters in Europe seem to think that this is becoming increasingly likely. So what would a disorderly Greek debt default mean for the global financial system? A leaked report that was authored by the Institute of International Finance says that a disorderly Greek debt default would have some very serious consequences. You can read the full text of that leaked report right here.

#4 An Economic Collapse In Spain – Spain has one of the largest economies in Europe and it is rapidly becoming a basket case. As I have written about previously, the unemployment rate in Spain has hit 19.9 percent, and the unemployment rate for workers under the age of 25 is up to 49.9 percent. Unfortunately, the situation in Spain continues to deteriorate. The following is from a recent article by Marc Chandler….

However, the devolution in Spain is particularly troubling. The new fiscal compact had just been signed last week, which includes somewhat more rigorous fiscal rule and enforcement, when Spain’s PM Rajoy revealed that this year’s deficit would come in around 5.8 percent of GDP rather the 4.4 percent target. This of course follows last year’s 8.5 percent overshoot of the 6 percent target.

The problem that for Spain is that the 4.4 percent target was based on forecasts for more than 2 percent growth this year. However, in late February, the EU cuts its forecast to a 1 percent contraction. This still seems optimistic. The IMF forecasts a 1.7 percent contraction, which the Spanish government now accepts.

#5 The Price Of Gasoline – The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has risen for 27 days in a row and is now up to $3.77. Virtually all forms of economic activity are affected by the price of gasoline, and if the price of gas keeps going up it is eventually going to have dramatic consequences for the U.S. economy.

#6 The Student Loan Debt Bubble – Just like we saw with the housing bubble, the student loan debt bubble just continues to grow and grow and grow. At some point the nearly 1 trillion dollar bubble is going to burst. What effect will it have on our financial system when that finally happens?

#7 State And Local Government Debt Crisis – It is being reported that California is running out of cash again and there are cities all over the country that are on the verge of bankruptcy. Could we see a significant municipal bond crisis in the next 12 months?

#8 The Collapse Of A Major U.S. Bank – A number of top U.S. banks are looking increasingly shaky. In a recent article, David Trainer explained why he has such serious concerns about Bank of America right now….

In my opinion, there are four actions taken by financial services that signal the company is headed to serious trouble.

1. Management shake-up and major layoffs – lots of layoffs over the past year

2. Exploiting accounting rules to boost earnings – SFAS 159

3. Drawing down reserves to boost earnings: to the tune of $13.3 billion in 2011 and 2012

4. Bilking customers with new fees: tried it before and trying it again

Bank of America has taken all four steps.

#9 A Derivatives Crisis – The International Swaps and Derivatives Association recently ruled that the Greek debt deal will not trigger payouts on credit default swaps. This is seriously shaking confidence in the global market for derivatives. But the global financial system simply cannot afford a major derivatives crisis.

Estimates of the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market range from $600 trillion all the way up to $1.5 quadrillion. The notional value of all derivatives held by Bank of America is approximately $75 trillion. JPMorgan Chase is holding derivatives with a notional value of approximately $79 trillion.

When the derivatives bubble finally bursts it is going to be a financial horror show unlike anything we have ever seen.

#10 The Fall Of The Japanese Economy – The Japanese economy shrank at a 2.3 percent rate during the fourth quarter of 2011. Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of over 200 percent and a major debt crisis involving Japan could erupt at any time.

#11 A “Solar Megastorm” – Scientists tell us that there is a “1 in 8 chance” that a “solar megastorm” will hit the earth by 2014. A recent Daily Mail article detailed what some of the consequences of such an event would be….

‘We live in a cyber cocoon enveloping the Earth. Imagine what the consequences might be,’ Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics told National Geographic when asked about a potential ‘megastorm’.

‘Every time you purchase a gallon of gas with your credit card, that’s a satellite transaction.

‘Imagine large cities without power for a week, a month, or a year. The losses could be $1 to $2 trillion, and the effects could be felt for years.

#12 A Major West Coast Earthquake Or Volcanic Eruption – On Monday, there was a 4.0 earthquake in San Francisco and a 6.1 earthquake in Argentina. Is the “Ring of Fire” waking up again?

#13 Tornado Damage To Major U.S. Cities – Last year, the U.S. experienced one of the worst tornado seasons of all time. This year, we have already seen the worst tornado outbreak ever recorded in the United States in the month of March. A couple of towns in Indiana were completely wiped out by that outbreak. So what should we expect when we get to the heart of tornado season this year?

#14 Severe Drought In The United States – Last summer was one of the driest summers on record in the United States, and in many areas there is simply not enough water available for farmers this year. Some are even projecting that we could see “dust bowl conditions” return to some areas of the country eventually.

#15 An Asteroid Strike In 2013 – Although scientists tell us that the probability is extremely low, the truth is that there is a slight chance that a sizeable asteroid could hit the earth in February 2013. The asteroid is estimated to be between 60 and 100 meters wide, and it is projected to pass by our planet “at a distance of under 27,000 km“. If it did hit us (and scientists say that the odds of that happening are very low) it would potentially be as serious an event as the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908. Mac Slavo of shtfplan.com recently described how awesome the Tunguska Event really was….

On June 30, 1908 an incoming meteor exploded approximately 5 miles above Siberia. The force of the air burst explosion, estimated at between 15 and 30 megatons, or about 1000 times bigger than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, was so powerful that it annihilated everything in an 830 square mile area, and reports suggest that that explosion was heard up to 1000 miles away. Because of the remoteness of the impact zone, the Tunguska Event over Siberia had very little effect on the human population in the region, but the destruction of some 80 million trees in the area shows just how powerful a blast was created.

Of course there are so many other “sudden change” events that could potentially happen – a terror event in a major U.S. city, a deadly pandemic, an EMP attack, cyberterrorism or a major political scandal could all possibly cause a stock market crash and an economic collapse in the United States.

In the world that we are living in today, you just never know what is going to happen.

This quote comes from the book 63 Alfred Street: Where Capitalism Failed by John Kossik, which blames the failures on Detroit for the inability of capitalism to work in a city where the immutable laws of the Visible Black of Economics have been at work for decades.

Kossik focuses his thesis on the tragic ruins of a Venetian Gothic mansion, built more than 130 years ago when white people were more than 99 percent of population there.

Capitalism didn’t fail Detroit, for it is capitalism that has allowed the lily-white suburbs to thrive, courtesy of the ingenuity of the people living there to innovate and produce something of wealth and value. Their labor is rewarded; in Detroit, the exact opposite is on display, courtesy of the Black population (89 percent of the city) found there.

Though it is not formal yet, Detroit’s beleaguered mayor is going to do what the first Black mayor of Detroit – Coleman Young – did so well: beg, plead, and pray for federal grants, federal aid, and or a loan to help keep the city moving forward. The Detroit News reported:

Mayor Dave Bing is seeking $125 million to $150 million in a short-term loan from the state to help fix the city’s fiscal crisis, Bing’s office confirmed Thursday night.

Bing’s request follows his State of the City speech Wednesday night where he vowed to keep an emergency manager out of the city and called for “tangible support” from the state, including financial and operational support.

Between 2009 – 2011 alone, Detroit Public Schools snagged $200 million in federal stimulus money (the largest amount given to any school system in the state of Michigan). The test scores and graduation rate produced by these Black scholars (96 percent of the K-12 student body in Detroit is Black) didn’t magically go up, though the drop-out rate did. Worse, Wayne County – home to Detroit – received a total of $2.4 billion in stimulus dollars between that same time.

Following complaints that the Detroit Human Services Department fostered an environment of nepotism, reckless spending and corruption to the detriment of the early childhood education program Head Start, the federal government plans to stop sending $50 million a year to the city to fund the program, the Free Press learned Thursday.

Head Start has been declared a failure, by the way. Meaning that the $50 million given to Detroit each year for more than 30 years has been a monumental waste of taxpayer money.

In July of 2011, the Detroit Free Press reported on another city department mismanaging $75 million in federal funds:

The FBI is investigating the city’s Human Services Department over misspent tax dollars and its handling of $100 million in federal grants.There’s been a continuing police investigation into how the city’s Department of Health and Wellness Promotion has handled about $75 million in state and federal funds. And Detroit Mayor Dave Bing fired the department’s director, Yvonne Anthony, in May.

More than 25 of Bing’s top appointees have left the city in the last two years, and Bing has pleaded with Detroit’s corporate community to be more active in helping to revitalize the city.

There is no tax-base in Detroit anymore. The wealth producers (i.e. white people) fled when the threat of criminality – almost entirely by Black people – became too great in the late 1960s. Those Black people who are in the middle-to-upper-middle class in Detroit are there because of intense affirmative action in the city’s government (and in the distribution of contracts to private contractors).

Fitting that Lyndon B. Johnson designated Detroit a “Model City” in the early 1960s, where hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into The Motor City to help alleviate poverty and help the growing Black population get off their knees and onto their feet.

There were nearly four dozen riots and more than 100 smaller cases of civil unrest in the United States in 1967, but Detroit’s riots were the deadliest. A Presidential commission later attributed most of the 43 deaths to police officers and National Guardsmen who, in the commission’s view, had gone out of control.The long-simmering anger of black residents at an abusive, mostly white police force erupted here in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, and lasted five days. The flash point was a raid by white police officers on an after-hours drinking and gambling club at the corner of 12th and Clairmount Streets, in a heavily black neighborhood. By the time the smoke cleared almost a week later, 683 buildings across the city had been damaged or destroyed and tanks had rolled through the streets.But the riots exacerbated demographic shifts that had begun a decade before in many big cities. Around 1940, many Southern blacks, like various immigrant groups before them, moved to Detroit for the work in the automobile factories. The city’s population at the time of the riots was one-third black, and by 1990 that percentage had grown to 76 percent.Even before the riots, many middle-class Detroit residents, particularly whites, had begun moving to the newly built suburbs, commuting to work on the broad highways being built. But the riots turned the steady stream of people moving to the suburbs into a torrent. Businesses followed their customers. Thousands of houses were abandoned as the city’s population plunged to 992,000 from 1.6 million at the time of the riots.Even today, some black residents refer to the upheaval here 30 years ago as a rebellion against racist white authority rather than a riot. The site where the troubles began, 12th Street, was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1976, after the civil rights heroine from Montgomery, Ala., who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and who later moved to Detroit.

What happened in Detroit is a strangely mirrors what happened in South Africa. The Great Migration of Blacks from the South in the early decades of the 20th century eventually overwhelmed the white population of Detroit. Black people had nothing to do with building Detroit; but they have had everything to do with destroying it.

Same goes with South Africa.

Since 1973, when the city was roughly 50 percent white and 50 percent Black (and boasting a population almost double– of which 89 percent are Black today – the 770,000 it is today), the various – all have been Black – mayors of Detroit have had to rely on grants, borrowing funds, and federal aid to keep the city going.

Fitting that the white residents of Detroit in 1973 – before packing their bags and heading to the suburbs to thrive – tried to save the city via the ballot box. Charles M. Carey’s African-America Political Leaders tells us this about the year Young was first elected:

In 1973 Young declared his candidacy for mayor of Detroit. His opponent was John F. Nichols, the white commissioner of the police who was running on a “law and order” platform. Young stole his thunder by promising to get rid of all kinds of crime, including police brutality. The polls indicated that more than 90 percent of whites favored Nichols, while more than 90 percent of the blacks favored Young. Since African Americans barely outnumbered white in Detroit, Young won by a few thousand votes.

Young didn’t get rid of crime, with Detroit instantly becoming one of the most dangerous cities in the world, known as the “Murder Capital” of America in the 1970s. Today, the police don’t even report – nor respond to 911 calls – the crime rate.

The floodgates for hiring Black people to get back at whitey began, with Young hiring more Black officers, firefighters, and municipal clerks. No longer could city employees live in the suburbs, they were forced to live in the city.

According to The Quotations of Coleman A. Young, this employment of affirmative action hiring policies had a purpose, with the newly elected Young saying:

“Some people say affirmative action is discrimination in reverse. You’re damned right. The only way to handle discrimination is to reverse it.”

The past is never past. The lesson of Detroit is the lesson for America; once in power, the presumed inequities of the past will be rectified. In the case of The Motor City, the lingering – dwindling – white population was severely discriminated against, and yet they were asked to pay the bill for their own dispossession.

They deserve no pity. The citizens of Detroit deserve no mercy.

The state of Michigan has created 16 “Michigan Renaissance Zones” in Detroit, which are virtually free of any taxation. The whole concept of “enterprise zones” is that instantly – without government intrusion through taxes – capitalism should flourish.

But capitalism hasn’t flourished. It would not be far fetched to state that trillions of taxpayer money (via federal loans, grants, and stimulus aid) over a span of fifty-sixty years has poured into Detroit. Whether it was to fight poverty, improve the test scores and graduation of primarily Black students, fight crime, maintain infrastructure, stimulate economic growth, or just pay city bills, the aid has been a waste.

Since the early 1930s and FDR, Detroit has had a tragic love affair with liberalism, the consequences of which have to a degree been comparable to the sieges by the cruel superpowers of antiquity – Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, the Huns, the Mongols. True, in Detroit there are no siege works here, no boiling oil, flaming arrows, catapults or battering rams, yet the barbarian hoards are not only at the gates, but are within the city gates, and these people, infected by a stubborn liberal mindset, are surely killing this town.

The white citizens of Detroit left, after being electorally defeated in a true racial election in 1973. This was after most had left because of the Black riot in 1967 and the high rates of Black crime that white citizens encountered in Detroit.

They built flourishing suburbs wherever they went, leaving behind a city they built to be ruled by Coleman Young and his Black friends.

Liberalism didn’t destroy Detroit anymore than capitalism did. It has been the ingenuity of others and the wealth they have created, which has been taxed by a government dedicated to the advancement of Black-Run America (BRA), and sent as federal aid and federal grants that have kept the city of Detroit going to this day.

In the Batman story No Man’s Land, Gotham City is hit with a massive earthquake that destroys the city. The cost of rebuilding is so great, the United States government decides to blow up every bridge out of Gotham and build a wall around the city, with 24/7 armed guards keeping everyone in the city (via huge walls) and preventing anyone from entering. Even members of the clergy and philanthropic organizations are barred from entering.

This could be one of the solutions to the Detroit problem.

Or, like the plan in Robocop, a private company could bailout the city, privatizing all of the agencies (police, fire department, waste, public transit, etc.) there in the process.

Knowing that neither of these two options would ever be implemented, it must be stated that Detroit must never be bailed out again.

Taxpayer money shouldn’t continue to support a city built on reversing the perceived racism of the past, blaming whitey for every problem that Black people encounter along the way.

It’s time Black people take responsibility for their actions. In this case, we are talking about the demise of one of the great American cities. Scratch that, one of the great cities of the world.

Black people forced white people out of Detroit, who in turn rebuilt the city in their image in the surrounding lily-white suburbs.

Commerce, innovation, and economic activity flourish there.

Detroit? Regression to the mean.

The Visible Black Hand of Economics on display for the world to see. Pumped with a continuous infusion of federal grants and federal aid (your taxpayer money that could have gone to space exploration or cancer research), Detroit has continued to deteriorate under Black rule.

Mayor Bing must be told “no” when he formally requests the $150 million in aid. For the sake of all Americans – Black and white, Hispanic and Asian – the citizens of Detroit must be told why the answer is “no” as well.

Right now, there’s a popular meme floating around — there usually is such a meme and if not, someone is this instant trying to invent it.

This blog is ducking it or not participating in talking about this meme, despite the fact that most readers expect a “unique angle” from every source they read, and participation in the meme would reward us with more popularity.

Most political rhetoric takes a form that a kindergarten teacher would delight in, which is to divide the world into a bad external thing versus those of who are (wink) in the know. In our enlightened state, we can avoid and even wage war against the bad thing. It’s so simplistic it’s improbable.

Yet it is popular for the same reason another theory of evil describes. In that view, the problem is not external things but the weakness within that is caused by self-interest and individualism. It’s like the Tragedy of the Commons writ large: the enemy is within and caused by our best intentions.

This theory (pioneered by Immanuel Kant) will never be popular because it is difficult to comprehend, and requires difficult action. “Don’t join the Klan” is a nice clear moral statement, which is why kindergarten teachers, government bureaucrats, television advertisers and controlling parents love it.

As the last thousand years show us, however, such simple binary statements of morality do not work. The instant we label something “good,” everyone with bad intentions will go over to it and adopt it as camouflage. In addition, none of our problems are that simple. As they are in our inner lives, our problems as a society involve self-discipline, getting organized and not procrastinating.

Because we are weak to such things, and because we want simple answers and simple distractions, we chase around after memes and trends and other irrelevancies. Almost none of us cared about the child slavery of central African warlords a week ago; what’s changed is that a meme became socially popular.

People are cashing in on the popularity of this meme. The result takes up bandwidth — airtime, column inches, gigabits and even minutes of conversation — and blocks us from discussing all the real issues. Even better, because we feel that rush of self-righteous “activism” with the meme, we don’t even look for any issues that could be more important. From nose to tail, it’s a surrogate for effective activity.

You have surely noticed that most of our society operates on such crazes. Government loves a trend, like Satanic ritual abuse or drug dealers in schools, because while the trend is in operation every expense can be justified by claiming to be fighting the evil identified by the trend.

“We need armored vehicles in our schools to fight the Satanic ritual abuse plague, sir, and they’re a steal at only $2.8 million each. Think the taxpayers will buy it?” They will. They always do, because the trend always sounds like a positive solution to a horrible problem.

Would you vote against stopping the suffering of bunnies? Would you vote against education? Funds to stop injustice, racism or hatred? You won’t vote against it in public of course, because these binary opposites make it seem as if you’re supporting the evil if you don’t join the crusade against it. Voting against funds to end the suffering of bunnies, in the eyes of your fellow citizens, means you support more bunny suffering. How inhuman of you.

Crazes are also popular with advertisers. They no longer have to do any real work; they can just hop on the bandwagon. For the same reason, crazes are socially popular: conversation just makes itself, kind of like talking about sports, TV or products, which is all most people seem to talk about anyway.

You can see the obvious problem. Our society distracts itself with trends, and the real problems just gain strength. Innocently each of us participate from fear of appearing evil by not joining the witch-hunt, or to profit, which makes us conspirators in replacing thinking with conformity.

If you wonder why complex societies can rot from within and collapse, as if everyone was tuned to the same television channel that hid the problems from them, this is why. Our social instinct as herd animals causes us to chase our own tail, and blind to reality, we don’t notice the threat — until the end.

Why Conservatives Always Lose

In our modern Western societies, liberals do all the laughing, and conservatives do all the crying. Liberals may find this an extraordinary assertion, given that over the past century their preferred political parties have spent more time out of power than their conservative rivals, and, indeed, no radical Left party has ever held a parliamentary or congressional majority. Yet, this view is only possible if one regards a Labour or a Democratic party as ‘the Left’, and a Conservative or a Republican party as ‘the Right’—that is, if one considers politics to be limited to liberal politics, and regards the negation of liberalism as a negation of politics. The reality is that in modern Western societies, both ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ consist of liberals, only they come in two flavours: radical and less radical. And whether one is called liberal or conservative is simply a matter of degree, not of having a fundamentally different worldview. The result has been that the dominant political outlook in the West has drifted ever ‘Leftwards’. It has been only the speed of the drift that has changed from time to time.

This is not to deny the existence of conservatism. Conservatism is real. This is to say that conservatism, even in its most extreme forms, operates against, and is inevitably dragged along by, this Leftward-drifting background. And this is crucial if we are to have a true understanding of modern conservatism and why conservatives are always losing, even when electoral victories create the illusion that conservatives are frequently winning.

It would be wrong, however, to attribute the endless defeat of conservatism entirely to the Leftward drift of the modern political cosmos. That would an abrogation of conservatives’ responsibility for their own defeats. Conservatives are responsible for their own defeats. The causes stem less from liberalism’s dominance, than from the very premise of conservatism. Triumphant liberalism is made possible by conservatism, while triumphant conservatism leads eventually to liberalism. Anyone dreaming of ‘taking back his country’ by supporting the conservative movement, and baffled by its inability to stop the march of liberalism, has yet to understand the nature of his cause. The brutal truth: he is wasting his time.

Much of our ongoing conversation about the future of Western society has focused on the deconstruction of liberalism. Not much of it has focused on a deconstruction of conservatism. Most deconstructions of conservatism have come from the Left, and, as we will see, there is good reason for this. It is time conservatism be deconstructed from outside the Left (and therefore also the Right). I say ‘also’ because neither conservatism nor traditionalism I class as ‘the Right’. Neither do I accept that ‘Right wing’ is the opposite of ‘Left wing’; ‘the Right’ is predicated on ‘the Left’, and is therefore not independent of ‘the Left’. Consequently, any use of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ coming from this camp is and has always been expedient; I expect such terms to disappear from current usage once the political paradigm has fundamentally changed.

Below I describe eight salient traits that define conservatism, explain the long-term pattern of conservative defeats, and show how liberalism and conservatism are complementary and mutually reinforcing partners, rather than contrasting enemies.

Anatomy of Conservatism

Fear

Proponents of the radical Left like to describe the politics of the Right as ‘the politics of fear’. Leftist propaganda may be full of invidious characterisations, false dichotomies, and outright lies, but this is one observation that, when applied to conservatism, is entirely correct. The reason conservatives conserve and are suspicious of youth and innovation is that they fear change. Conservatives prefer order, fixity, stability, and predictable outcomes. One of their favourite refrains is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. There is some wisdom in that, and there are, indeed, advantages to this view, since it requires less effort, permits forward planning, and reduces the likelihood of stressful situations. Once a successful business or living formula is found, one can settle quite comfortably into a reassuring routine in a slow world of certainties, which at best allows for gradual and tightly controlled evolution. Change ends the routine, breaks the formula, disrupts plans, and lead to stressful situations that demand effort and speed, cause stress and uncertainty, and may have unpredictable outcomes. Conserving is therefore an avoidance strategy by risk-averse individuals who do not enjoy the challenge of thinking creatively and adapting to new situations. For conservatives change is an evil to be feared.

No answers

We can deduce then that the reason conservatives fear change is that they are not very creative. Creativity, after all, involves breaking the mould, startling associations, unpredictability. Conservatives are disturbed by change because they generally know not how to respond. This is the primary reason why, when change does occur, as it inevitably does, their response tends to be slow and to focus on managing symptoms rather than addressing causes. This is also the primary reason why they either plan well ahead against every imaginable contingency or remain in a state of denial until faced with immediate unavoidable danger. Conservatives are first motivated by fear and then paralysed by it.

Defensive

Unfortunately for conservatives, the world is ever changing, the universe runs in cycles, and anything alive is always subject to unpredictable changes in state. Because they generally have no answers, this puts conservatives always on the defensive. The only time conservatives take aggressive action is when planning against possible disruptions to their placid life. They are the last to show initiative in anything else because being a pioneer is risky, fraught with stress and uncertainties. Thus, conservatism is always a resistance movement, a movement permanently on the back foot, fighting a tide that keeps on coming. The conservatives’ main preoccupation is holding on to their positions, and ensuring that, when retreat becomes inevitable, their new position is as close as possible to their old one. Once settled into a new position, any lull in the tide becomes an opportunity to recover the previous position. However, because lulls do not last long enough and recovering lost positions is difficult, the recovery is at best partial, never wholly successful. Conservatives are consequently always seen as failures and sell-outs, since eventually they are always forced to compromise.

Necrophiles

Their lack of creativity leads conservatives to look for answers in the past. This goes beyond learning the lessons from history. Averse to risk, they mistrust novelty, which makes their present merely a continuation of the past. In this they contrast against both liberals and traditionalists: for the former the present is a delay of the future, for the latter it is a moment between what was and will be. At the same time, conservatives resemble the liberals, and contrast against traditionalists more than they think. One reason is that they confuse tradition with conservation, overlooking that tradition involves cyclical renewal rather than museological restoration. Museological restoration is what conservatives are about. Their domain is the domain of the dead, embalmed or kept alive artificially with systems of life support. Another reason is that both liberals and conservatives are obsessed with the past: because they love it much, conservatives complain that things of the past are dying out; because they hate it much, liberals complain that things of the past are not dying out soon enough! One is necrophile, the other a murderer. Both are about death. In contrast, traditionalism is about life, for life is a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and renewal.

Boring

Fear, resistance to change, lack of creativity, and an infatuation with dead things makes conservatives boring. Dead things can be interesting, of course, and in our modern throwaway society, dead things can have the appeal of the exotic, particularly since they belong to a time when the emphasis was on quality rather than quantity. Quality, understood both as high quality and possessing qualities, is linked to rarity or uniqueness, excitement or surprise, and, therefore, creativity or unpredictability. Conservatives, however, conserve because they long for a world of certainties—slow, secure, comfortable, and with predictable outcomes. Granted: such an existence can be pleasant given optimal conditions, and it may indeed be recommended in a variety of situations, but it is not exciting. Excitement involves precisely the conditions and altered states that conservatives fear and seek to avoid. It thus becomes difficult to get excited about anything conservative.

Old

There are good reasons why conservatism is associated with old age. As a person grows old he loses his taste for excitement; his constitution is less robust, he has less energy, he has fewer reserves, he has rigidified in mind and body, and he is less capable of the rapid, flexible responses demanded by intense situations and sudden shocks. It makes sense for a person to become more conservative as he grows old, but this is hardly a process relished by anyone. Once old enough to be taken seriously, the desire is always to remain young and delay the signs of old age. Expressing boredom by saying that something ‘got old’ implies a periodic need for change. Conservatives oppose change, so they get old very fast.

Irrelevant

Preoccupation with the past, resistance to change, and mistrust of novelty eventually makes conservatives irrelevant. This is particularly the case in a world predicated on the desirability of progress and constant innovation. Conservatives end up becoming political antiquarians, rather than effective powerbrokers: they operate not as leaders of men, but as curators in a museum.

Losers

Sooner of later, through their refusal to adapt until they become irrelevant, conservatives are constantly left behind, waving a fist at the world with angry incomprehension. Because eventually survival necessitates periodic surrenders and regroupings at positions further to the Left, conservatives come to be seen as spineless, as people always in retreat, as, in short, losers. The effective function of a conservative in present-day society is to organise surrender, to ensure retreats are orderly, to keep up vain hopes or a restoration, so that there is never risk of a revolutionary uprising.

Liberalism’s Best Ally

With the above in mind, it is hard not to see conservatism as liberalism’s own controlled opposition: it may not be that way, but the effect is certainly the same. Conservatism provides periodic respite after a bout of liberalism, allowing citizens to adapt and grow accustomed to its effects before the next wave of liberalisation. Worse still, conservative causes, because they eventually always become irrelevant, provide a rationale for liberalism, supplying proof for the Left of why it is and should remain the only game in town. Liberals love conservatives.

Conservatism and Tradition

Conservatism does not have to be liberalism’s best ally: conservatism can be the best ally of any anti-establishment movement, since it always comes to represent the boring alternative. Conservatives defend the familiar, but familiarity breeds contempt, so over time people lose respect for what is and grow willing to experience some turbulence—results may be unpredictable and may indeed turn out to be negative, but at least the turbulence makes people feel alive, like there is something they can be actively involved in. In the age of liberalism, conservatism is fundamentally liberal: it does not defend tradition, since liberalism has caused it to be forgotten for the most part, but an earlier version of liberalism. In an age of tradition, conservatism could well be the best ally of a rival tradition, since conservatism always stagnates what is, thus increasing receptivity over time to any kind of change. Thus conservatism sets the conditions for destructive forms of change.

By contrast, tradition is evolution, and so long as it avoids the trap of conservatism (stagnation), those within the tradition remain engaged with it. This is not to say that traditions are immune from self-destructive events and should never be abandoned: hypertely, maladaption, or pathological evolution, for example, can destroy a tradition from within. However, that is outside our scope here.

Confusion of Tradition and Conservation

In the age of liberalism, because it has forgotten tradition, tradition is confused with conservation. Thus some conservatives describe themselves as traditionalists, even though they are just archaic liberals. Some self-described traditionalists may erroneously adopt conservative traits, perhaps out of a confused desire to reject liberalism’s notions of progress. Tradition and conservation are distinct and separate processes. Liberalism may contain its own traditions. Liberalism may also become conservative in its rejection of tradition. Likewise for conservatism, except that it rejects liberalism and does so only ostensibly, not in practice.

End of Liberalism

Ending liberalism requires an end to conservatism. We should never call ourselves conservatives. The distinction between tradition and conservation must always be made, for transcending the present ‘Left’-‘Right’ paradigm of modern democratic politics in the West demands a great sorting of what is traditional from what is conservative, so that the former can be rediscovered, and the latter discarded as part of the liberal apparatus.

In doing so we must be alert to the trap of reaction. Reactionaries are defined by their enemies, and thus become trapped in their enemies’ constructions, false dichotomies, and unspoken assumptions. Rather than rejection, the key word is transcendence. The end of liberalism is achieved through its transcendence, its relegation into irrelevance.

Given the confusion of our times, it must be stressed that tradition is not about returning to an imagined past, or about reviving a practice that was forgotten so that it may be continued exactly as it was when it was abandoned. There may have been a valid reason for abandoning a particular practice, and the institution of a new practice may have been required in order for the tradition successfully to continue. A tradition, once rediscovered, must be carried forward. Continuation is not endless replication.

After Liberalism

The measure of our success in this enterprise will be seen in the language.

We know liberalism has been successful because many of us ended up defining ourselves as a negation of everything that defined liberalism. Many of the words used to describe our political positions are prefixed with ‘anti-‘. This represented an adoption by ‘anti-liberals’ of negative identities manufactured by liberals for purposes of affirming themselves in ways that suited their convenience and flattered their vanity.

Ending liberalism implies, therefore, the development of a terminology that transcends liberalism’s constructions. Only when they begin describing themselves as a negation of what we are will we know we have been successful, for their lack of an affirmative, positive vocabulary will be indicative that their identity has been fully deconstructed and is then socially, morally, and philosophically beyond the pale.

Developing such a vocabulary, however, is a function of our determining once again who we are and what we are about. Without a metaphysics to define the tradition and drive it forward, any attempt at a cultural revolution will fail. A people need a metaphysics if they are to tell their story. If the story of who we are and where we are going cannot be told for lack of a defining metaphysic, any attempt at a cultural revolution will need to rely on former stories, will therefore lapse into conservatism, and thus into tedium and irrelevance.

After Conservatism

One cannot be for Western culture if one is not for the things that define Western culture. A metaphysics, and therefore ‘our story’, is defined through art. Art, in the broadest possible sense, gives expression to values, ideals, and sentiments that a people share and feel in the core of their beings, but which often cannot be articulated in words. Therefore, the battle for Western identity is waged at this level, not in the political field, even if identity is a political matter. Similarly, any attempt to use art for political purposes fails, because politics, being merely the art of the possible, is defined by culture, not the other way around.

In the search for ‘our story’, we must not confuse art with craft. Craftmanship may be defined by tradition, and a tradition may find expression in crafts, making them ‘traditional’, but the two are not synonymous. Similarly, craftsmanship may improve art, but craft is not art anymore than art is craft. Art explores and defines. Craft reproduces and perpetuates. Thus, art is to tradition what craft is to conservatism. This is why contemporary art, being an extreme expression of liberal ideals, is without craftsmanship, and why art with craftsmanship is considered conservative, illustration, or ‘outsider’.

Those concerned with the continuity of the West often treat reading strictly non-fiction and classics as proof of their seriousness and dedication, but ironically it will be when they start reading fiction and making new fiction that they will be at their most serious and dedicated. If tradition implies continuity and not simple replication, then it also implies ongoing creation and not simple preservation.

After Tradition

No tradition has eternal life. Ours will some day end. Liberalism sees its fulfilment as the end of history, but that is their cosmology, not ours. Therefore, liberalism does not—and should never—indicate to us that we have reached the end of the line. The degeneration of the West is tied to the degeneration of liberalism. The West will be renewed when the liberals come crashing down. They will be reduced to an obsolete and irrelevant subculture living off memories and preoccupied with conserving whatever they have left. Once regenerated, the West will continue until its tradition self-destructs or is replaced by another. Whatever tradition replaces ours may be autochthonous, but it could well be the tradition of another race. If that proves so, that will be the end of our race. Thus, so long as our race remains vibrant, able to give birth to new metaphysics when old ones die, we may live on, and be masters of our destiny.

Long But Good Egghead Article

Since the overwhelming majority of westerners are sleeping in the matrix of political correctness, the white revolution is predicated on the forthcoming catastrophe that may awaken the millions rather abruptly. Michael O’Meara’s 2005 essay-review, The Widening Gyre: Guillaume Corvus’ La convergence des catastrophes, originally published at National Vanguard, is worth revisiting.

Nearly three hundred years ago, the early scientistic stirrings of liberal modernity introduced the notion that life is like a clock: measurable, mechanical, and amenable to rationalist manipulation. This modernist notion sought to supplant the traditional one, which for millennia held that life is organic, cyclical, and subject to forces eluding mathematical or quantifiable expression. In this earlier view, human life was understood in terms of other life forms, being thus an endless succession of seasons, as birth, growth, decay, and death followed one another in an order conditioned by nature.

That history is cyclical, that civilizations rise and fall, that the present system will be no exception to this rule—these notions too are of ancient lineage and, though recognized by none in power, their pertinence seems to grow with each new regression of the European biosphere. With Corvus’ Convergence des catastrophes, they assume again something of their former authority.

“For the first time in its history,” Corvus writes, “humanity is threatened by a convergence of catastrophes.” This is his way of saying that the 18th-century myth of progress—in dismissing every tradition and value distinct to Europe—is about to be overtaken by more primordial truths, as it becomes irrefutable evident that continued economic development creates ecological havoc; that a world system premised on short-term speculation and financial manipulation is a recipe for disaster; that beliefs in equality, individualism, and universalism are fit only for a social jungle; that multiculturalism and Third World immigration vitiate rather than re-vitalize the European homelands; that the extension of so-called republican and democratic principles suppress rather than supplant the popular will, etc.

In a word, Corvus argues that the West, led by the United States, is preparing its own irreversible demise.

Though Convergence des catastrophes takes its inspiration from the distant reaches of the European heritage, its actual theoretical formulation is of recent origin. With reference to the work of French mathematician René Thom, it first appeared in Guillaume Faye’s L’archéofuturisme (Paris: L’aencre, 1998), arguably the most important work of the “new European nationalism.” Indeed, those familiar with his style and sentiments are likely to suspect that “Corvus” is Faye himself.

Anticipating today’s “chaos theory,” Thom’s “catastrophe theory” endeavored to map those situations in which gradually changing circumstances culminate in abrupt systemic failure. Among its non-scientific uses, the theory aimed at explaining why relatively smooth changes in stock markets often lead to sudden crashes, why minor disturbances among quiescent populations unexpectedly explode into major social upheavals, or why the Soviet Union, which seemed to be surpassing the United States in the 1970s, fell apart in the 1980s.

Implicit in Thom’s catastrophe theory is the assumption that all systems—biological, mechanical, human—are “fragile,” with the potential for collapse. Thus, while a system might prove capable of enormous expansion and growth, even when sustaining internal crises for extended periods, it can, as Thom explains, suddenly unravel if it fails to adapt to changing circumstances, loses its equilibrium, or develops “negative feedback loops” that compound existing strains.

For Corvus—or Faye—the liberal collapse, the tipping point, looks as if it will occur sometime between 2010 and 2020, when the confluence of several gradually mounting internal failures culminate in something more apocalyptic. Though the actual details and date of the impending collapse are, of course, unpredictable, this, he argues, makes it no less certain. And though its effects will be terrible, resulting in perhaps billions of dead, the chaos and violence it promises will nevertheless prepare the way for a return to more enduring truths.

What is this system threatening collapse and what are the forces provoking it? Simply put, it is the techno-economic system born of 18th-century liberalism—whose principal exemplar has been the United States and Europe, but whose global impetus now holds most of the world in its grip.

Faye’s work does not, however, focus on the system per se. There is already a large literature devoted to it and, in several earlier works, he has examined it at length. The emphasis in Convergence des catastrophes is on delineating the principal fault lines along which collapse is likely to occur. For the globalization of liberal socioeconomic forms, he argues, now locks all the world’s peoples into a single complex planetary system whose fragility increases as it becomes increasingly interdependent. Though it is difficult to isolate the catastrophes threatening it (for they overlap with and feed off one another), he believes they will take the following forms:

1. The cancerization of the social fabric that comes when an aging European population is deprived of its virile, self-confident traditions; when drug use, permissiveness, and family decline become the norm; when a dysfunctional education system no longer transmits the European heritage; when the Culture Industry fosters mass cretinization; when the Third World consolidates its invasion of the European homelands; and, finally, when the enfeebling effects of these tendencies take their toll on all the other realms of European life.

2. The worsening social conditions accompanying these tendencies, he predicts, will be exacerbated by an economic crisis (or crises) born of massive indebtedness, speculation, non-regulation, corruption, interdependence, and financial malpractices whose global ramifications promise a “correction” more extreme than that of the 1930s.

3. These social and economic upheavals are likely to be compounded by ecological devastation and radical climatic shifts that accelerate deforestation and desiccation, disrupt food supplies, spread famine and disease, deplete natural resources (oil, along with land and water), and highlight the unsustainability of the world’s present overpopulation.

4. The scarcity and disorders these man-made disasters bring will not only provoke violent conflicts, but cause the already discredited state to experience increased paralysis, enhancing thus the prospect of global chaos, especially as it takes the form of strife between a cosmopolitan North and an Islamic South.

These catastrophes, Faye argues, are rooted in practices native to liberal modernity. For the globalization of Western civilizational forms, particularly American-style consumerism, has created a latently chaotic situation, given that its hyper-technological, interconnected world system, dependent on international trade, driven by speculators, and indifferent to virtually every non-economic consideration, is vulnerable to a diverse range of malfunctions. Its pathological effects have indeed already begun to reach their physical limit. For once the billion-plus populations of India and China, already well embarked on the industrializing process, start mass-producing cars, the system will simply become unfit for human habitation. The resource depletion and environmental degradation that will follow are, though, only one of the system’s tipping points.

No less seriously, the globalizing process creates a situation in which minor, local disputes assume planetary significance, as conflicts in remote parts of the world are imposed on the more advanced parts, and vice versa. (“The 9/11 killers were over here,” Pat Buchanan writes, “because we were over there.”)

In effect, America’s Empire of Disorder is no longer restricted to the periphery, but now threatens the metropolis. Indeed, each new advance in globalization tends to diminish the frontier between external and internal wars, just as American sponsored globalization provokes the terrorism it ostensively resists. The cascading implication of these developments have, in fact, become strikingly evident. For instance, if one of the hijacked Boeings of 9/11 had not been shot down over Pennsylvania and instead reached Three-Mile Island, the entire Washington-New York area would have been turned into a mega-Chernobyl—destroying the US economy, as well as the global order dependent on it. A miniature nuke smuggled into an East Coast port by any of the ethnic gangs specializing in illegal shipments would have a similar effect.

Revealingly, speculation on such doomsday scenarios is now seen as fully plausible.

But even barring a dramatic act of violence, catastrophe looms in all the system’s domain’s, for it is as much threatened by its own entropy (in the form of social-racial disorder, economic crisis, and ecological degradation), as it is by more frontal assaults.

This is especially the case with the global economy, whose short-term casino mentality refuses the slightest accountability. Accordingly, its movers and shakers think nothing of casting their fate to fickle stock markets, running up bankrupting debts, issuing fiat credit, fostering a materialistic culture of unbridled consumption, undermining industrial values, encouraging outsourcing, de-industrialization, and wage cutting, just as they remain impervious to the ethnocidal effects of international labor markets and the growing criminality of corporate practices.

Such irresponsible behaviors are, in fact, simply another symptom of the impending crisis, for the system’s thinkers and leaders are no longer able to distinguish between reality and their virtualist representation of it, let alone acknowledge the folly of their practices.

Obsessed with promoting the power and privileges sustaining their crassly materialist way of life and the progressive, egalitarian, and multicultural principles undergirding the global market, they see the world only in ways they are programmed to see it.

The ensuing “reality gap” deprives them, then, of the capacity both to adapt to changing circumstances or address the problems threatening the system’s operability. (The way the Bush White House gathers and interprets “intelligence,” accepting only that which accords with its ideological needs, is perhaps the best example of this).

In this spirit, the system’s leaders tirelessly ensure us that everything is getting better, that new techniques will overcome the problems generated by technology, that unbridled materialism and self-gratification have no costs, that cultural nihilism is a form of liberation, that the problems caused by climatic changes, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and shrinking energy reserves will be solved by extending and augmenting the practices responsible for them.

These dysfunctional practices are indeed pursued as if they are crucial to the system’s self-legitimacy. Thus, at the very moment when the system’s self-corrective mechanisms have been marginalized and the downhill slide has become increasingly immune to correction, the charlatans, schemers, and careerists in charge persist in propagating the belief that everything is “hunky-dory.”

Karl Marx spilt a great deal of ink lambasting ideologues who thought capitalism arose from natural principles, that all hitherto existing societies had preordained the market’s triumph, or that a social order subordinate to economic imperatives represented the highest stage of human achievement.

Today, the “new global bourgeoisie” gives its euronationalist critics even greater cause for ridicule. Paralyzed by an ideology that bathes itself in optimistic bromides, the system’s rulers “see nothing and understand nothing,” assuming that the existing order, in guaranteeing their careers, is a paragon of civilizational achievement, that the 20,000 automobiles firebombed every year in France by Muslim gangs is not sign of impending race war, that the non-white hordes ethnically cleansing European neighborhoods will eventually be turned into peaceful, productive citizens, that the Middle East will democratize, that the spread of human rights, free-markets, and new technologies will culminate in a consumer paradise, that limitless consumption is possible and desirable, that everyone, in effect, can have it all.

Nothing, Faye argues, can halt the system’s advance toward the abyss.

The point of no return has, indeed, already been passed. Fifteen years of above average temperatures, growing greenhouse gases, melting ice caps, conspicuous biological deterioration, and the imminent peaking of oil reserves, combined with an uncontrolled Third World demographic boom, massive First World indebtedness, social policies undermining the state’s monopoly on our loyalties, and a dangerous geopolitical realignment—each of these potentially catastrophic developments is preparing the basis of the impending collapse.

Those who think a last minute international agreement will somehow save the day simply whistle pass the graveyard. Washington’s attitude (even more pig-headed than Beijing’s) to the modest Kyoto Accords—which would have slowed down, not halted greenhouse emissions—is just one of the many signs that the infernal machine cannot be halted.

The existing states and international organizations are, in any case, powerless to do anything, especially the sclerotic “democracies” of Europe and United States, for their corrupt, short-sighted leaders have not the slightest understanding of what is happening under their very noses, let alone the will to take decisive action against it. Besides, they would rather subsidize bilingual education and Gay Pride parades (or, on the conservative side, ban Darwin) than carry out structural reforms that might address some of their more glaring failures. For such a system, the sole solution, Faye insists, is catastrophe.

The ecological, economic, demographic, social, civilizational, and geopolitical cataclysms now in the process of converging will bring about the collapse of liberalism’s technoeconomic civilization. In one of the most striking parts of his book, Faye juxtaposes two very different TV images to illustrate the nature of the present predicament: one is of a troubled President Bush, whose Forrest Gump antics left him noticeably perplexed on 9/11; the other is of the traditionally-dressed, but Kalashinokov-bearing Bin Laden, posing as a new Mohammed, calmly and confidently proclaiming the inevitable victory of his rag-tag jihadists.

These two images—symbolizing the archaic violence that promises to disturb the narcoticized sleep of a sickened modernity—sum up for Faye the kind of world in which we live, especially in suggesting that the future belongs to militant traditionalists rooted in their ancestral heritage, rather than high-tech, neo-liberal “wimps” like Bush, who are alienated from the most elementary expressions of Europe’s incomparable legacy.

Though rejecting liberalism’s monstrous perversion of European life, Faye does so not as a New Age Luddite or a left-wing environmentalist. He argues that a technoeconomic civilization based on universalist and egalitarian principles is a loathsome abnormality—destructive of future generations and past accomplishments.

But while rejecting its technological, bureaucratic, cosmopolitan, and anti-white practices, he fully accepts modern science. He simply states the obvious: that the great technological and economic accomplishments of Europe cannot be extended to the world’s six billion people—let alone tomorrow’s ten billion—without fatal consequence. For this reason, he predicts that science and industry in a post-catastrophe world will have no choice but to change, becoming the province of a small elite, not the liberal farce that attempts to transform all the world’s peoples into American-style consumers.

Similarly, Faye does not propose a restoration of lost forms, but rather the revitalization of those ancient spirits which might enable our children to engage the future with the confidence and daring of their ancestors. Thus, as befits a work of prophecy, Faye’s survey of the impending tempests aims at preparing us for what is to come, when the high flood waters and hurricane winds clear away the system’s ethnocidal illusions and create the occasion for another resurgence of European being. It aims, in a word, at helping Europeans to resume the epic course of their history.

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Race Realism

‘Man is a mammal and subject to the same biological laws as other animals. All animals, including Man, have inheritable behavioural traits. The concept of complete environmental plasticity of human intelligence is a nonsensical wishful-thinking illusion.’

From titans to Lemmings

“The time for talk has ended, only course of action open to us is WAR!”

"The time for talk has ended, only course of action open to us is WAR!"

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence

Ayers’ Plan to Kill 25 Million Americans
Larry Grathwol, Weathermen, William Ayers, Communism, History
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“The most effective informer the F.B.I. ever placed among the Weathermen” (NY Times) Larry Grathwol describes how William Ayers and other Weather Underground leaders cheerfully planned to deliver the United States to foreign occupation, and proposed to murder 25 million Americans.

Grathwohl: I brought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people?

The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re‑educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re‑educate, that are die-hard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated and when I pursued this further, they estimated that they’d have to eliminate 25 million people in these re‑education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.

Bring it on! WE WILL FIGHT YOU, WE HAVE BEEN MAKING BOMBS AND BUYING LEGAL AND ILLEGAL WEAPONS FOR YEARS, AND WHEN THE TIME COMES MY FELLOW PATRIOTS AND MYSELF, WE WILL TAKE TO THE STREETS, YOU WILL HAVE TO KILL US TO TAKE THIS NATION, BRING IT!!